Bluetill POS — bank compatibility

Bluetill is a point-of-sale system for hospitality. a Sydney system that started life in duty free shops back in 1996.

Certified on mx51, which is the engine behind several banks’ own terminal offerings rather than something a merchant buys by name.

It handles tipping, phone and mail order and surcharging.

The mx51 integration uses SPI .NET or Spice and was last certified in August 2021, on Windows. mx51 holds 2 separate certified builds for it, so what works depends which one you are on.

Bluetill comes from Forhim Technologies Pty Ltd, a Sydney shop founded by James Choi in 1996. It began with duty free stores and moved into general retail and hospitality from there — which is an unusual starting point, and it shows in the product.

The design choice worth knowing is that it is a hybrid. It runs over the internet, but it can also be installed on a local server that needs no internet connection at all. If you have ever had a cloud till go down mid-service, that is the pitch. Card payments integrate with Westpac Presto Smart or Tyro, and it ships a reporting module called Quick Insight.

The customer list says something about how it gets sold: Sydney Duty Free, Maxel Electrical, Allcoast Roofing, Maxima Coffee, Sushi Hiro, a public school at Niagara Park, a police station in Wollongong, plus Elliot Rhodes in London and a natural latex business in Thailand. Not a vertical specialist — a long-lived generalist with a long tail of odd installs.